Noel Long to appeal conviction for murder of Cork woman

Noel Long was convicted of Nora Sheehan's murder this month and was given the mandatory life sentence. File picture: Collins Courts

A sex offender who was jailed for life this month for the murder of a mother-of-three 42 years ago in Cork is appealing his conviction for her murder.

Noel Long’s legal team has lodged an appeal against his conviction for the murder of Nora Sheehan, whose body was found bruised and mostly naked in woods outside Innishannon in 1981.

Mrs Sheehan’s family said they did not wish to comment on the appeal. They had spoken about their long fight for justice after the trial and about how Mrs Sheehan’s tragic loss had impacted generations of her family.

Noel Long, 74, of Maulbawn, Passage West, Co. Cork was convicted of her murder this month and was given the mandatory life sentence on August 4. The trial made legal history as the oldest murder prosecution in the history of the State.

Although Long had been charged with her murder in the weeks after her body was found, the sudden death of the pathologist who conducted the post-mortem examination on Mrs Sheehan’s body meant that the case was dropped.

A cold case review into her killing was opened in 2008 and Long was later charged again with her murder.

Mrs Sheehan, 54, was vulnerable before her death, the trial at the Central Criminal Court heard. She had been to hospital for treatment of a dog bite the day she disappeared and was last seen alive waving at cars later that night.

Her body was found bruised and scratched in Shippool Woods days later. Semen found in Mrs Sheehan’s bruised body was preserved after her death and a partial DNA profile from that sample matched DNA found on a beanie hat of Long’s retrieved in 2021.

Forensics

The probability of the DNA profile originating from someone unrelated to “the man in the beanie hat” would be one in 23,000, Dr Jonathan Whittaker of the UK Forensic Science Services told the Central Criminal Court.

And based on a database of the Irish population, it was at least 20,000 times more likely the recovered DNA was a match to that found on the beanie hat than an unrelated person, forensic biologist Dr Dorothy Ramsbottom of Forensic Science Ireland told the court.

Other forensic material linked Long to the crime scene, with paint fragments found on Mrs Sheehan's clothing matching paint from Long's car and fibres found on the victim matching fibres from the carpet in Long's car.

Long had denied the murder of Ms Sheehan, between June 6 and June 12, 1981, at a place unknown in the State.